What all political and social thinking has finally been forced to face is, of course, the irreversible degradation of the environment by unrestrained industrial capitalism: the enormous fact of which science has been trying for fifty years to convince us, while technology provided us ever greater distractions from it. Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned.

Yet we can’t stop the process. A capitalist economy, by definition, lives by growth; as Bookchin observes: “For capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be for it to commit social suicide.” We have, essentially, chosen cancer as the model of our social system.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in “The Next Revolution” represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it. He critiques the failures of past movements for social change, resurrects the promise of direct democracy and, in the last essay in the book, sketches his hope of how we might turn the environmental crisis into a moment of true choice—a chance to transcend the paralyzing hierarchies of gender, race, class, nation, a chance to find a radical cure for the radical evil of our social system.

Reading it, I was moved and grateful, as I have so often been in reading Murray Bookchin. He was a true son of the Enlightenment in his respect for clear thought and moral responsibility and in his honest, uncompromising search for a realistic hope.

Review of Red State Revolt, The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics by Eric Blanc on Verso Books, 2019. ---- By Michael Mochaidean ---- Last year's wave of public teacher strikes and walkouts was the highest number of workers walking off the job in three decades. Whether it will be the start of a larger trend across other sectors is ye […]

This is a public communication from the High security prison in Santiago and extends to the mobilization of all the prisons of the territory in Chile. ---- "We start an indefinite liquid and hunger strike in rejection to Law 321 which modifies all the postulation times for benefits, as well as keeping us behind the bars for a lot more time." ---- O […]

The interprofessional trade union CNT-AIT (section of the International Association of Workers) in Madrid announced the launch of protests against Faunia and calls for its boycott. The cause of the conflict was the dismissal from the company's El Olivo restaurant in Valdebernardo, Comrade Emanuele. ---- A fellow worked as a cook in a restaurant and open […]

Constructing virtual storage of articles in companies has become a brand new stage within the development of business information surroundings, associated with the growth of the availablility of separated sources, file systems, information systems and outside sources of data that users need to consult with. Cloud data storage is highly demanded because of co […]

This Wednesday CNT La Felguera returns to the court to demand what is fair. On this occasion, it will be DMS, contract of Capgemini Spain the more than likely will have to admit another partner in the template. The union encourages us to attend the event and calls the fight "to the entire staff of Capgemini in a union where we organize ourselves as equa […]

On May 17, the union sections of the metal of Bizkaia agreed to participate in the strike days called by the unions ELA, LAB, UGT and CCOO. ---- "More than 50,000 workers in this historic territory have frozen wages and working conditions, we have to put an end to this situation", said the CNT. ---- The strike of the metal sector of Biscay will be […]

André Hébert was a volunteer with the YPG between 2015 and 2017. He delivers through this book a fascinating political testimony on the current revolution. ---- This book was first motivated by the need to twist the necks of the untruths circulating on the conflict that ignited and still sets Syria on fire. Indeed, after having initially supported the Free S […]

On May 26, Italian citizens will vote to elect the new European parliament, and 400 million European voters will be called to the polls. ---- Several hundred candidates are ready to be elected to give continuity to their self-representation, perpetuating a simulacrum of democracy in a scenario crossed by strong systemic contradictions. ---- These elections a […]

The 38 th Confederal Congress of the CFDT is held from 8 to 12 May 1979 in Brest. Between the policy of "refocusing" and exclusions, it marks a turning point in the history of the plant. The CFDT will therefore resolutely turn its back on the self-management socialist orientation that had made its originality and its appeal in the post-68. In defia […]

The Glyphosate Campaign is one of the most successful initiatives in the fight against pesticides. Collectives are being created all over France to lodge complaints against this invisible pollution. Questions to Dominique Masset, co-founders of the campaign in Ariège. ---- Libertarian alternative: How was born the idea of this campaign of samples and urine t […]